What You Can Learn About Someone Over Coffee

Networking is a muscle, and you do get better at it over time.

As a quiet teenager who spoke only a few words of English, moving from Ukraine (known at the time as the Soviet Union) to Saskatchewan didn’t exactly help build my interpersonal skills.

It was the late 1970s, and while Western culture was new to me, I fell in love with the music immediately. Thanks to the Ramones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and the Sex Pistols, my English steadily improved, and I eventually worked up enough nerve to get a job as a bartender at the BBop Cafe in Regina.

One might think that I was there to serve drinks, but conversations with people became 90 per cent of what I did. It was not uncommon for waitresses to come to me complaining that I was stealing their tips because customers chose to come directly to the bar. Not only did these conversations help me get phone numbers and party invites, they are also how I ended up moving to Toronto (but that’s a story for another time). I may not have known it, but this was also my first foray into networking. It’s something I would continue to do every day for the next 25 years.

What I’ve learned is that networking is a muscle, and you do get better at it over time. If you had coffee with me in the 1990s and one today, you’d be talking to a completely different person (and that has nothing to do with the length of my hair or outfit choice).

As a quiet teenager who spoke only a few words of English, moving from Ukraine (known at the time as the Soviet Union) to Saskatchewan didn’t exactly help build my interpersonal skills.

It was the late 1970s, and while Western culture was new to me, I fell in love with the music immediately. Thanks to the Ramones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and the Sex Pistols, my English steadily improved, and I eventually worked up enough nerve to get a job as a bartender at the BBop Cafe in Regina.

One might think that I was there to serve drinks, but conversations with people became 90 per cent of what I did. It was not uncommon for waitresses to come to me complaining that I was stealing their tips because customers chose to come directly to the bar. Not only did these conversations help me get phone numbers and party invites, they are also how I ended up moving to Toronto (but that’s a story for another time). I may not have known it, but this was also my first foray into networking. It’s something I would continue to do every day for the next 25 years.

What I’ve learned is that networking is a muscle, and you do get better at it over time. If you had coffee with me in the 1990s and one today, you’d be talking to a completely different person (and that has nothing to do with the length of my hair or outfit choice).

The only two questions you need to lead

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